


Sleight of Hand

by yuraaa



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, Misunderstandings, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-13
Packaged: 2019-03-03 13:04:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13341819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuraaa/pseuds/yuraaa
Summary: When Katsuki Yuuri stumbles upon a drunk, silver-haired man on New Year's Eve, what could possibly go wrong?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First Victuuri fan fic, and yeah this is basically just a prologue and I hope this makes a little bit of sense and you enjoy

_Take a deep breath, and start from the beginning._

 

Kiss him, but try not to think about the taste of fireworks exploding in your mouth. At least that’s what Mari used to tell him when he was nineteen, and didn’t know better. That just because someone’s got their tongue in your throat, doesn’t mean they’re teaching you how to breathe. But college was full of kings, and queens, and vagabonds, and no amount of fire precaution can save you from silver-haired explosions.

Yuuri was nine years old when he first felt the betrayal of gravity, and it took three forehead stitches, and an arm cast to warn him not to go climbing places, no matter how beautiful the view, if it meant falling is the only means to get down, because almost always something usually gets broken. And no one wants to be a Humpty Dumpty that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put together again.

But he was different. Victor was.

It wasn’t so much as a fall, than it was a plunge. A leap. Because Victor was the kind you defy the height of skyscrapers for. Even though he was so, so stupid. So stupid to get drunk on New Year’s Eve when cries for help were gunshots along the uproar of firecrackers. So stupid to lie defenselessly on the nearby kindergarten park pavement coated by the unforgiving midnight air.

But perhaps the biggest idiot of them all was Yuuri forgetting to lock the inn’s door. Yuuri chasing after Vicchan because it just _had_ to be that night when his loyal dog decides to ignore his pleas, and goes sniffing around for wasted Russians that violates all concept of self-control. Perhaps, when he actually looks back at all of it, it was his fault for playing the Good Samaritan and aiding a strange, gurgling mess of a man lying beside his own vomit. _Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps._ The word blinks like a dysfunctional neon sign in his brain.

But Yuuri has always liked the color blue, and when the foreign wreck opened his eyes, all he could remember was thinking ‘ _Ah, yes, these are the eyes that God has based the sky upon.’_

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asks, in spite of the fact that the man before him looked like the aftermath of a war. He crouches down, clears his throat, and tries again.

“Do you speak English?” To which the man answers with a moan. Slowly, as if he were trying not to detonate a ticking time bomb, he brushes away the stray silver strands from his eyes. The stranger tilts his head, and leans into his touch, and suddenly this night was 5ºC but this was the warmest Yuuri’s ever been.

“I’m here to help you, can you stand up?” Yuuri was always persistent to a fault, and he can graciously feel the cruel consequence of that now. He carefully lifts the nameless figure’s arm up, but the man is everything, _vibrantgloriousbeautiful_ , but cooperative.  Sighing in defeat, he sits down next to him on the concrete, Vicchan nosing on his leg.

“Happy New Year.” Yuuri says quietly into the night as a Roman Candle flames somewhere. Spending the first hour of the year in distress over someone he doesn’t know wasn’t how he thought the rest of the night would go, but here he is so to hell with it, he supposes. He wishes he had worn warmer pajamas.

“You know, fireworks remind me of the Armageddon.” Yuuri almost jumps from the stranger’s intrusion of his silence. “Fascinating, but everything always ends up in ashes.”

“And the smoke stinks.” Yuuri adds like an uneducated spoon. The man’s mouth twitches in amusement. Yuuri wants to frame that smile in a museum.

“Something may have died inside my brain, my head hurts.”

“Do I need to set up a funeral?”

Yuuri’s mother always told him that everyone was entitled to one miracle. The winning lottery numbers. A bouquet of four-leaf clovers. Finding an extra fry inside the bag. Being at the right place, at the right time.

“Do you always look after random men bathing in their own bodily fluids?”

“Only when they have a thing for the end of the world.”

And that should have been his warning, really. That him right there was the apocalypse. An earthquake.  A hurricane. Laughter in the middle of Yuuri’s tiny living room when they were bigger than everything else because each second spent with him cannot be contained by the confines of the Universe.

Vicchan was snoring. The hair on Yuuri’s arms standing in surrender to the frigid breeze, but that’s okay because orange was warm, red was the sweltering heat, but silver was a volcanic eruption. The man sits up, flick his bangs away to the side, and sticks out a hand.

“Hi, I’m Victor.” This was it. The moment all 97 million love songs are written about and somewhere in his grave, Shakespeare is trembling. Yuuri tries and orders his lungs to not fail him tonight when he reaches out for the hand in front of him. When he was a kid, Mari always took him up on the roof whenever he couldn’t sleep, the smoke from her cigarette like a flare for the extraterrestrial, and he’d stretch his arms up, waiting for the galaxy to pick him up.

 “Hi, I’m Yuuri.”

Holding Victor’s hand was the Universe finally responding.

“Well, Yuuri, did you know that everyone has a unique tongue print just like fingerprints?”

Yuuri swallows. His saliva catches on his throat. He tries not to die.

“So if I kiss you now, do I gain a part of your identity or will you have mine?”

And this was very much like a scene of a crime, Yuuri was almost wondering why there were no sirens blaring, no yellow police tape being set around them like a noose, because he was sure this was illegal. This was a work of the comical divine, to stumble upon your one shot at a miracle when you’re in your oversized sleepwear, and them smelling like a brewery. Reality was half a world away, and would it really be so bad If it never came back?

“Both. If you remember this tomorrow.” Yuuri answers.

 Like a promise.

_Remember._

_This happened._

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A penny for your drunken thoughts?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm having a lot of fun writing this, enjoy!

Yuuri never did get to kiss Victor that night, nor the night after. But he was half-convinced that he has somehow transported himself to an alternate universe, because these things don’t _just_ happen. Not to people like him. He wouldn’t be surprised if Victor was a dream. Something you’d always be cautious to touch. Something you’d always be careful not to break. Victor was porcelain.

Victor leaned his forehead onto Yuuri’s shoulder, his silver hair brushing the side of his neck. Yuuri’s hand twitched with the desire to run his fingers through them. He listed every reason why he shouldn’t, and died with the fact that he wish he could. Yuuri cleared his throat, causing Victor to peek up at him through his lashes. Those eyes will be printed as Yuuri’s cause of death. The man before him was unreal, maybe because he wasn’t. A part of him regrets not sharing the taste of regret through Victor’s tongue but ‘ _Dammit, Katsuki, you’re supposed to be making better life decisions than this!’_

“Do you think you can stand up now? Where do you live? I can take you home.” Yuuri offers, and Victor laughs.

“Can you, now?” Yuuri has never seen a lunar eclipse. He’s barely caught a glimpse of a shooting star, but looking at Victor now, he wonders if all beautiful things always look like they’re running away from something.

“I can call someone to pick you up if that makes you feel any better?”

Victor squeezes his eyes shut and groans.

“Yakov is going to kill me.” He mumbles. As if Yuuri hadn’t found him already half dead. Victor pats around his pockets, and sighs in relief at the feel of his phone. The red blinking of notifications on his screen looks like someone’s been murdered, or in Victor’s case, about to be.

“I’ll be fine now, Yuuri, you can go. Why are you even out here in the first place?” And why, indeed? A coincidence. A necessity. Because you looked like you needed help, or maybe it was the other way around? Maybe because all our lives we’ve been playing a brutal game of hide and seek, and wouldn’t you know it, _I actually found you._

But Yuuri doesn’t say any of those things. Because Katsuki Yuuri was 173cm of doubt and anxiety. Because his mind was his own personal rain cloud and he couldn’t just say ‘ _Tonight doesn’t make much sense, so until the sun rises can we be creatures from somewhere else?’_ Yuuri would barricade his teeth with a barbwire before he let any of those words loose. So instead he pointedly looks at Vicchan, and Victor melts.

“He’s adorable!” Victor coos, and when he realizes the dog was already sound asleep, he adds in a quieter voice. “I have one just like him, but a bit bigger.” And Yuuri hates Victor for making him imagine it, and hates himself more for wanting it. Victor ruffling the fur of his bigger-than-Vicchan poodle, his eyes crinkling on the side out of mirth.

Victor was lovely, but he was a curse.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking but what are _you_ doing out here so late?” Yuuri chews on his bottom lip. Mari always teased him when he was a kid that someday he’d bite on it hard enough for it to actually fall off, and he would have to give up eating Katsudon because he’d make such a mess out of eating it and mom would yell at him for all the litter. Yuuri remembers crying about that a lot.

“It’s a Russian thing.” Victor grins, and it was all the light Yuuri ever saw. He wants to keep it, put it safely inside a box, and preserve it on his shelf.

“I know you’re drunk, but that doesn’t make sense at all.”

“Nothing about this night has made sense, Yuuri.”

“Is that bad?”

“The worst.”

And in this specific point in time, the worst was okay. The worst was the best they had to offer. Because you don’t just go and talk casually with a random stranger, at the most random hour, on New Year’s Eve for heaven’s sake. Not if you have a death wish. But here they are, and Yuuri wants to hug Victor so tight because he looks like Pangaea. Like he’s about to drift apart away from himself any second now, and Yuuri thinks ‘ _Why would anyone want to ruin you?’_

But Victor was right. Questions were best saved for sober mornings. Tonight was best left alone with no questions asked, at least not the ones that matter. Tonight they wouldn’t cross dangerous territories.

“Have you ever gone figure skating, Yuuri?” Victor asks. Yuuri loves the sound of his name in his mouth. As if it belongs there. He feels dizzy at the thought of Victor saying it under different circumstances.

“Yes, but the best I can do is not fall on my ass. My friend Yuuko manages the ice skating rink nearby, and I visit her sometimes.”

“Is she a lover?” Yuuri blanches enough to want to slap the word back into Victor’s lips like it were a form of profanity. Heat rises up his cheeks much to Victor’s amusement.

“I told you, she’s a friend!”

Victor throws his head back, and looks up at the moon. Yuuri does the same. The Butterfly Effect was a funny, funny thing. Yuuri was never very good at looking at the bigger picture of things, but he must have done something right along the way to get here. After all, the Moon looks brighter tonight.

“You’re a good person, you know. For coming. Even more so, for staying.” Victor whispers into the cold air like they were trading secrets.

“Anyone else would have done the same.” Yuuri scratches the back of his head sheepishly.

“Do you really believe that?” Victor scoffs.

Not in the slightest, of course. But he can always rely on the atmosphere of New Year’s Eve for breeding bad decisions.

“I couldn’t just leave you alone.”

“Why not?”

Yuuri bites into his cheek, and buries his teeth enough to make an indent. The silence thickens the air.

“You should come with me some time, figure skating, that is.” Victor steers the conversation away as if he were driving a car about to slam into a lamp post because tonight was strictly no questions asked. _Right._

And Yuuri can see it in his mind. Victor gliding across the ice, his long, silver hair whipping after him like a comet tail. The kind of scene that could only be viewed with the Hubble Space Telescope because Victor doesn’t look like he belongs here on Earth. Maybe Neil Armstong really was a hoax. Maybe Victor was the first man on the Moon.

“Would saying yes now still be a good idea in the morning?” Yuuri smiles at him weakly.

“It isn’t even a good idea now, I don’t think it’ll be any better even if given with enough sunlight.” Yuuri laughs at that. He likes it, the odd flow of conversation between them. The giddy thrill of their sudden companionship.

“You’re not the best at advertising yourself, are you?” Yuuri quirks an eyebrow to which Victor responds with an exaggerated hair flip. He knows he’s beautiful, and this is why Victor is dangerous. This is why Yuuri is fucked.

“Does this face seem like it needs to make an effort to be advertised?” Yuuri stares at him with a blank look, and stands up, pretending to make plans to walk away. Victor clutches on to his sleeve like a child.

“I was kidding, wait a sec!” Victor pouts, and Yuuri wants to wipe that frown away with his thumb. As if he could actually walk away from this now. As if he hadn’t been digging his own grave all evening. When Yuuri sleeps tonight, he’ll think of his bed as a coffin. He sits back down, and Victor beams like a light house.

“I have a week left until I have to go back to school so…” He trails off because Yuuri is weak. He is so, so weak.

“Is that a yes?” If Victor had a tail, it would be wagging furiously by now.

“More or less?” Yuuri answers helplessly. 

“Then I’ll take it!”

Victor smiles, and his eyes are the deepest blue that Yuuri’s ever seen. This must be what men feel like when they’re lost at sea.

Yuuri wishes he had taken swimming lessons.


End file.
